Candy Hearts
by random fanfic writer
Summary: Emma and Sean have the perfect Valentine's day planned as soon as Emma helps her brother address his valentines and sort the candy conversation hearts. Except . . . did that heart just say bend over?


**a/n: An idea I couldn't get out of my head or get anyone else to write for me. I don't own Degrassi or anything.**

"J . . . A . . . C . . ." Jack spelled his name out slowly as he wrote each letter on the bright red paper. Valentines were a big deal in preschool apparently and he wanted to get his name just right on each of them, even if no one had the heart to tell him the holiday would be over before his party tomorrow.

Emma smiled as she watched over him. She had promised she would help her brother with her valentines before getting ready for her date with Sean. At that point, Manny would take over. Emma had worried a little about leaving Manny alone on Valentine's Day so soon after her break up with Craig, but Manny had insisted that Jack would be her perfect valentine – as long as she didn't have to deal with messy markers or sticky candy.

_Speaking of which_, Emma thought reaching for the bag of conversation hearts her mother had had delivered to the house. Apparently _anything_ could be bought on-sale over the internet or so her mother told her. With Manny staying for the unforeseeable future, Spike had been trying anything that may save money, including shopping online for candy hearts.

Emma smiled as she opened one of the bags of candy. It wouldn't hurt to just try one. She loved sweet tarts. She shook a purple one into her hand and absently read the message before popping it into her mouth.

_Lick me._

The words Emma had just read suddenly registered and she choked on the small heart coughing it out. She must have misread the message. It had to have said "love me" or something. The slobbery candy in her hand however, still steadfastly said _lick me._

Emma threw it into the sink rinsing and drying her hands before quickly dumping out the rest of the hearts onto the table ignoring Jack's sharp "Hey!" as one bounced under his fat red crayon.

He soon changed his tune as he saw it was candy. "Ooooh," he squealed reaching for it.

Emma knew it was irrational, but couldn't help snatching it away before Jack could touch the candy heart – her brother could barely spell his own name, but she didn't want him to be _tainted_ in some way by the candy's messages.

Sure enough, the heart she had rescued from her brother was also completely inappropriate. Unless three year olds had "booty calls."

Jack's lower lip dangerously trembled in the universal symbol for _give me candy or I will cry_. Emma quickly worked to diffuse the situation.

"Jackie, we need to save these candy hearts for your friends tomorrow, remember?" she told her brother, letting out a sigh of relief when he nodded and went back to remembering which direction a J pointed.

She poured through the hearts on the table, before realizing that the majority of messages were not appropriate for polite company, let alone polite preschool company. Fabulous. It was already almost five o'clock. Sean would be there in an hour. She had no time to go to the store and replace the candies let alone any money to purchase new ones.

She grabbed the bag she had opened and looked at the label. _Naughty Hearts_ the label read. _Tell your lover exactly what you want him or her to do . . . or him **and** her!_

Emma placed her head in her hands and tried not to scream in frustration. She would just have to go through the candies and see if any could be saved. Surely they couldn't be _all_ suggestive.

Or so Emma thought. _Suck me,_ she read to herself. Well that's not so bad – maybe someone would think they wanted the candy sucked, she thought moving it from the discard pile to the "maybes" before noticing a faint third word. _Off. _Hrm. On second thought she moved it to "no." She had been working at making an acceptable amount of candy to send to preschool for quite a while with only a little bit of progress. So far, she had been working at the candy for an hour without much progress.

A few of the hearts said _yes_ or _kiss me_ which Emma had decided were okay messages. Others such as _I'm horny, bend over _and _let's screw_ had been immediately discarded. And others such as _lick me _and _eat me_ Emma had placed in a third pile. The "only if desperate" pile.

Emma was beginning to question where she should put the pink heart that read _steamy_ when the doorbell rang. She snapped out of her organizational system to realize with a sinking heart that only one person was expected tonight. _Sean._

Jack had rushed to answer the door at the first ring and Emma scrambled behind him to stop him from answering it.

"Hi, Sean!" Jack chirped from the doorway.

_Too late,_ Emma cringed. She stopped in the entryway trying to collect herself, a feat made all the harder by the sight before her. Sean had dressed up for the occasion, wearing black slacks and a collared white shirt with a _tie_, a jacket slung carelessly over one shoulder. His recently cut hair was slicked just so and he held in his other hand a single red rose. He was, without a doubt, a dream come true.

Emma tried not to cry as she thought of the slinkly red dress in her closet she had meant to put on after the shower she had meant to take. She had wanted to make him wait a few moments and then take his breath away. Instead she was wearing her tattered grey sweatpants and a bulky sweatshirt covered in heart stickers Jack had decorated her with earlier, her hair piled on top of her hair and held in place with a stray pencil. Not exactly dreamy on her end.

"Am I early?" Sean asked, looking more than a bit confused at the scene inside. "I can come back if you want? Or wait somewhere?" He looked so flustered and apologetic at what was not at all his fault that Emma couldn't help it when she burst into frustrated tears.

Emma covered her face in her hands trying to stop the traitorous tears. This was the first time she had a real Valentine in years and her date was perfect. And instead of getting ready to enjoy it like a normal teenage girl, she had been stuck sorting G from X rated messages all night. It wasn't fair.

Emma felt something wrap itself around her legs and realized belatedly her brother was watching this whole thing. "Don't cry, Emma" he whispered, looking up at her close to tears himself.

She immediately felt about two inches tall and more selfish than ever before. Instead of helping her stop, it just brought on a second wave of tears and she extracted herself from Jack's arms and Sean's gaze to escape to the kitchen without a word.

As she tried to calm herself and wash her face in the kitchen she heard Sean asking what was wrong and Jack's reply about her not liking candy. She smiled wryly. She liked candy very much. She just didn't like candy with _Do me_ written on it.

Sean knocked on the swinging kitchen door to his credit and waited for her faint "come in" to do so.

His eyes quickly took in the piles of candy hearts and valentines strewn around the kitchen table and Emma's defeated posture. "Care to explain?"

Emma laughed once although it came out more as a sob. Sean moved to comfort her but she held up a hand to ward him off. She was not going to cry again. Unless he hugged her and then she would have no control over her actions or her disappointment in how this night had gone.

She explained tersely about how Manny refused to touch the valentines and how the delivery mix-up had led to careful reading of each and every small candy. When she finished she was afraid to meet his eyes. He had everything perfectly and for such a stupid thing to screw up their perfect date . . . well, it was too much to bear.

Sean didn't say anything for a long while. She started to worry about his silence until she heard a small sound that was a lot like . . . did he just _snort_?

"There's really a heart that says _nice tits_?" he asked not bothering to restrain his laughter any longer.

"This isn't funny!" Emma shrieked throwing a candy heart at him.

He deftly caught it in one hand taking a moment to read the message before raising one eyebrow suggestively. "Bite me?" he asked, popping the candy into his mouth. In seconds he had crossed the kitchen to the sink and pulled Emma into a kiss. She opened her mouth to object, Jack was in the other room and the entire situation was highly inappropriate, but he just took that opportunity to deepen the kiss further. In fact, Emma's eyes popped open in surprise as he transferred the small candy heart into her own mouth with his tongue.

She tried to pull away but Sean was relentless, sucking on her lower lip until all conscious thought left her mind. In fact it wasn't until he _bit_ her lower lip that she regained control of her thoughts enough to pull away sharply.

She stepped back, her fingers touching her lower lip. "You _bit_ me!" Emma shrieked before lowering her voice. "Why did you do that!"

Sean smirked. "You told me to. Or rather your rather naughty candy did." And at that, he began to laugh again.

Emma crossed her arms in front of her chest. "I fail to see how any of this is funny! Jack's valentines are ruined, we've probably already missed our reservations and we have several pounds of candy that we can not give away!"

Sean, however, ignored her, loosening his tie and rolling up his sleeves. "Well, first thing is first right? Looks like we've got a long way to go, here to save Jackie's valentines."

Emma put a palm to her forehead, trying to rub out the worry lines that had formed in the past hour or so. "What do you mean? Why aren't you mad at me?"

Sean snickered. "Em, I sincerely doubt you created a piece of candy that says _suck my _well, you know," he finished, trailing off at her blush. "So let's make the best of it."

Emma looked at him unsurely. "You're sure? I haven't ruined all your Valentine's Day plans?"

Sean sighed. "Em, I want to spend today with _you._ If spending the day with you means separating red hearts that say _love ya_ from red hearts that say _spank ya_ . . . well, that's what I'm going to do."

Emma searched his eyes for any hesitation before slowly smiling. "Well, then scoot over Cameron. I have a highly complex system."

It wasn't a perfect Valentine's Day nor even one that was planned, but years later the two could still remember the night they spent filtering out the naughty hearts from the more benign. And later still they made quite a few other Valentine's Day memories with the hearts that Sean managed to slip into his pocket when Emma wasn't looking.


End file.
